US Prison Practices Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages: Texas—A Case on Record (2013)

How a society treats its prisoners not only reflects its level of civilization, but also reveals the true character and workings of its overall political system, despite how its proponents might portray it­–which is certainly true of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ).

Here in the US, where mass brainwash has been developed to levels unsurpassed by any other society in history, few dare to question what the government says in praise of itself or in criticism of others.

All the average person needs to hear is that some anonymous “government official said . . . ,“ and they faithfully accept whatever follows. But let one criticize this system, and they must produce a mountain of evidence and ‘credible’ sources in support, if they’re to be given even passing consideration.

This is why this article, which follows many that I’ve written bearing witness to the foul nature of US prisons, will be based on documented government findings and records. The focus of this discussion will be on the TDCJ, where I’ve found myself recently confined and was sent by Virginia and Oregon prison officials in undeniable revenge for my various exposés of and involvement in struggles against abusive conditions and practices in their prison systems, where I was previously confined.

It’s All on Record

The record on which I will rely arose in a federal lawsuit that has spanned over 40 years and was first titled David Ruiz v. W. J. Estelle (Ruiz).1

I will often quote directly from the court’s findings in that case showing the heinous conditions and abuses in the TDCJ, which continue and which I’ve personally witnessed and experienced since being here.

To Silence Those Who Expose

When I first arrived in the TDCJ on June 14, 2013, officials acknowledged knowing my history of writing to expose prison abuses and litigating against and otherwise challenging such conditions. In turn on that very date, I was attacked three separate times by TDCJ officials while handcuffed, and assured that I’ll be broken or killed.

They destroyed my address book, targeting my lines of communication to the outside, and have made repeated efforts to provoke reactions from me that will in turn speciously justify their escalating further violence against me, with the intent of acting out their threats on my life.

I’ve never taken the bait, however.

In just my first two weeks in the TDCJ, I witnessed and endured all manner of lawless abuses, which were the subject of my earlier article titled, “The Texas Department of Cowboy Justice: A Case of Lawless Law Enforcement.”2 Then by chance I discovered the Ruiz case, and, on reading its series of published rulings, came to realize that I was witnessing a long established and system-wide culture of open abuse, racism and terrorism, practiced by TDCJ officials against their prisoners, with approval from the highest levels of power in the Texas government. It also gave recorded proof that Virginia and Oregon officials had indeed deliberately chosen to send me to a prison system where officials were notoriously known and already inclined to openly use the most extreme abuses against dissenters, the object being to silence me.

All of which reflect today’s general practice of US officials persecuting and terrorizing any and all who dare publicly reveal their lies and crimes, by making targeted examples of whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and the unprecedented numbers of US intelligence agents who’ve been criminalized under the Obama administration for exposing official crimes. Not to mention the multitudes of non-imbedded independent journalists and news agencies that were killed and bombed by US forces and their allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, where US war crimes have been the order of the day.

What they fear is exposure. Exposure that reveals the lies, hypocrisy and illegitimacy of this system and discredits them. Exposure that has proven to spark mass awakening and upsurges that challenge and overthrow that power. This is why Confucius (a shrewd advisor to oppressive monarchs) recognized that the one thing a ruler must maintain at all costs to retain his power is the trust and confidence of the people he rules over. Which proves equally true today, where discredited governments have everywhere been facing mass uprisings that have seen them overthrown or fighting their own populations in efforts to hold on to their discredited power.

“My Enemies are the Nudists,” Says the Naked Emperor

If US officials ever got their hands on foreign government records revealing abuses of the sort Ruiz found in the TDCJ, especially if it were an avowed enemy like the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, the world would have never heard the end of it.

Certainly one recalls the wide publicity given (by the US and Co.) to Aleksandar Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in many editions worldwide (he also won the Nobel Peace Prize). A book which has since been exposed as an item of false propaganda against the former Soviet Union based largely on rumors; Solzhenitsyn never tested the credibility of his sources and knowingly peddled sums of false information including about himself. Also the book was penned by others than just himself. That his life and works were largely manufactured and fabricated have been exposed in a thoroughly documented and detailed study.3

But Ruiz Isn’t Fiction

Yet neither the world nor the US public knows anything about Ruiz and cases like it. However, US officials are quick to denounce anyone who’d claim US forces abuse prisoners they hold abroad, and dares one to even imagine that they might mistreat their own prisoners at home. But Ruiz blows the lid off this can of lies! Indeed the horror of TDCJ conditions and abuses were found to be so deplorable that the Ruiz court stated:

“It is impossible for a written opinion to convey the pernicious conditions and the pain and degradation which ordinary individuals suffer in TDCJ prison walls. . . .”

Ruiz—the Case

David Ruiz filed his federal lawsuit in 1972 against the then TDCJ director W.J. Estelle (after whom the notoriously abusive Estelle Unit prison was named).

The lawsuit challenged severe overcrowding (where prisoners under Third World-like conditions were made to live literally packed together into tiny cells and dormitories like sardines); lack of mental health and medical care (the vast majority of TDCJ prisoners–some 68%­–suffer mental illness yet received no care, and medical care was substandard to nonexistent, leaving prisoners to suffer with untreated diseases, broken bones, etc.; in fact untrained prisoners often acted as medical staff); systemic beatings by guards and predatory violence and rapes of prisoners by other prisoners (at such epidemic levels that a climate of “violence and terror reigned”4 ); officials obstructing prisoners efforts to use the courts to protect their basic rights (including by beating and harassing them, obstructing attorney-client contacts, filing bogus disciplinary reports against them, etc.); abusive and arbitrary solitary confinement and disciplinary practices; torturous conditions of confinement in segregation; severe understaffing and use of prisoners (known as “Building Tenders”) to violently run the prison housing units in lieu of guards; lack of adequate food; and overall failure to provide safe confinement conditions for TDCJ prisoners, etc.

That the prisoners were able to challenge the TDCJ’s barbaric conditions at all was uncommon, and turned on the fact that the Texas federal courts were suddenly willing to expend the necessary resources to accommodate hearing such a case, and appointed a judge from an entirely different district to preside over it, namely Judge William Wayne Justice.

The court’s actions were part of the US government’s panicked response to mass uprisings fueled by exposures of its criminal practices at home and abroad that officials admitted nearly toppled the US government. US prisoners were a significant driving force in this movement, and were exposing to a horrified public the cruel reality of the US prison system, and the role of prisons in countering such mass movement. In response and in efforts to rechannel this energy, the federal courts began hurriedly opening their doors to prisoner lawsuits, reversing their decades-old “hands-off” policy towards prisoner litigation.

After much stonewalling and maneuvering to sabotage the case by TDCJ officials and their attorneys (the Texas Attorney General’s office among them), the trial began in 1978 and “lasted longer than any prison case—and perhaps any civil rights case—in the history of American jurisprudence.” At its conclusion, Justice found TDCJ officials guilty of every charged violation and criticized the fact that they’d lied throughout the proceedings to the bitter end, “refus[ing] to concede that any aspect of their operations were unconstitutional, and vigorously contested the allegations of the inmate class on every issue.” ((Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F supp 1265, 1390 (S.D. Tex. 1980).))

Justice was to observe that this

“epic trial in 1978 and 1979. . . offered a rare glimpse behind the walls that so conveniently shielded free world society from the barbaric living conditions of many of the approximately 25,000 individuals then incarcerated in the TDC prison system. . . [from which he found a] staggering magnitude of constitutional violations.”5

Terrorists in Government

Throughout the proceedings the TDCJ acted at every turn to terrorize the prisoner plaintiffs and their witnesses off the case. From brutal beatings, to malicious transfers and hounding them at every TDCJ prison they went to, to throwing them into the hole on fabricated disciplinary charges, to harassing those who tried to use the law libraries, etc. In one case, they had one of the prisoner plaintiff’s throat cut to “scare him off the Ruiz case.”6

Terrorizing the prisoner participants was so persistent that the court issued 5 separate orders against the TDCJ, trying to protect the prisoners and ordering the abuses to stop. The orders went ignored, and the Texas Attorney General, in cahoots with it all, appealed to the 5th Circuit Appeals Court attempting to have them overturned, which the Appeals Court declined to do, finding the prisoners were suffering

“threats, intimidation, coercion, punishment, and discrimination, all in the face of protective orders to the contrary by the district court and our long standing rule that the right of a prisoner to have access to the courts to complain of conditions to his confinement shall not be abridged. . . . In light of TDCJ’s past record and evidence of continuing unwillingness to respect plaintiffs’ fundamental right to meaningful, unimpeded access to the courts, a detailed order for relief in this area will be required, and it will be necessary that TDCJ’s compliance be closely monitored.”7

Yet the abuses continued to such a degree that at the conclusion of the trial on September 20, 1979, the court ordered that all willing prisoner participants were to be removed from the TDCJ to serve out the remainder of the sentences in federal custody. “Eighty-one inmates subsequently elected to transfer, and all transfers had been accomplished by November 20, 1979.”8

The Relief

On April 20 and May 1, 1981, judgments were entered granting broad injunctive relief requiring the TDCJ to reduce overcrowding, increase its security and support staff, provide adequate medical and mental health care, bring living and working conditions into compliance with state health and safety standards, etc., and a court monitor was appointed to supervise compliance with the orders. The Appeals Court made some modifications to the relief but upheld the judgment.

But the state continually fought the case through a series of motions and appeals, and protracted negotiations that went on through the 1980’s.

Finally, in March 1990, the court ordered the parties to negotiate a final resolution of all remedial issues, which took until July 1992, although the TDCJ had a motion filed in 1991 before the court (the US government jumped sides to join in the motion since the insurgent political climate of the 1960’s-70’s was long past), seeking to avoid any further remedial actions from the court, since they claimed drastic improvements had been made throughout the TDCJ, and that no serious claims of continuing unconstitutional conditions could be said to exist. The motion was denied. And in December 1992 after an evidentiary hearing, the negotiated agreement (consent decree) was accepted by the court.

Ruiz—Round Two

The state of Texas never stopped trying to end the Ruiz case to invalidate the consent decree. In 1996, they moved to vacate the consent decree lyingly claiming full compliance. A few months later, Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act into law, which provided them with another avenue of seeking to overturn Ruiz.

The PLRA alongside rulings like Turner v. Safley,9 was enacted to turn the clock back to the days of the old “hands off” treatment of prisoner lawsuits; since opening the courthouse doors produced a flood of prisoner litigation seeking judicial protection against abusive conditions endemic to US prisons nationwide. Part of the PLRA allowed prison officials to get courts to terminate consent decrees against prison conditions unless the prisoners could show ongoing unconstitutional conditions on a systemwide level.10

So TDCJ filed a motion to terminate Ruiz under the PLRA; necessitating another trial in 1999 to determine if unconstitutional abuses persisted throughout the TDCJ. The court again found that systemwide barbaric conditions still existed, especially in the areas of guards frequently and gratuitously beating prisoners (usually while restrained in handcuffs), prisoner-on-prisoner violence caused by conditions in the TDCJ, and psychological torture caused by conditions in the administrative segregation units.

Up through trial TDCJ officials and their attorneys again acted at every turn to frustrate the progress of the case, refusing to cooperate with discovery and maneuvering to block the prisoners’ lawyers and experts from entering TDCJ prisons. The courts overruled these efforts.

The conditions found to continue to exist in the TDCJ were again horrifying. The prisoners’ experts who observed and investigated the conditions in the units included Dr. Craig Haney, Ph. D., J.D., Dr. Dennis M Jurczak, M.D. and long-time court monitor Allen Breed. All of whom were highly credentialed in their fields of expertise and had extensive experience in monitoring and reporting on conditions in prisons, particularly in the areas of mental health care, conditions of administrative segregation and uses of force by guards. Each of them found conditions and abuses in these areas in the TDCJ to be among the worst they’d ever seen.

Just Beat ‘Em

Conditions with respect to guard assaults on prisoners and ad-seg were especially appalling. In describing the conditions the court found, I’ll largely quote the court itself:

“The Texas prison system, having grown to incarcerate approximately 140,000 inmates in over 100 penal institutions, has instituted a complex web of policies and regulations designed to alleviate many, if not all, of the problems.”11

Yet in the 1999 proceedings:

“the court was reacquainted with the culture of sadistic and malicious violence that continues to pervade the Texas prison system [and] violates contemporary standards of decency. . . .”12

“As with the conditions of inmate safety, the abuse of force has resulted not from deficient policies, but from the seeming inability of correctional officers to keep their hands off prisoners.”13

“Plaintiffs presented this court with a collage of inmates’ injuries—broken jaws, bruised faces, and broken bones, among others. These injuries were shown to be the results of wholly unnecessary physical aggression by prison employees. Unfortunately, the pattern of uncalled for ‘slamming,’ hitting, and kicking by corrections officers in the cellblocks of TDCJ-ID is so prevalent as to implicate the Constitution.”14

“Plaintiffs’ experts testified to the institution’s reliance on force or threat of force for the control of people. . . .They cited examples of force being used simply to punish or hurt inmates, and frequent pushing, shoving, and other unnecessary physical contact. . . . Plaintiffs’ expert Allen Breed, who had monitored the use of force in several other states, found Texas to be worse, in quantity and degree, than any other system he had seen. . . .Evidence demonstrated that inmates are being struck by officers with their fists—a practice deemed inappropriate by defendants’ expert witness Gary DeLand; and that they suffer other injuries from officer actions. . . . Monitoring, supervision, grievance, and investigations processes were found to be inadequate to curb the excessive use of force. . . .The court determined that in numerous examples brought before it, no justification for use of force by TDCJ-ID officers existed, or the force used was disproportionate to the circumstances. The prevalence of excessive use of force was held to be cruel and unusual punishment.15

“It is notable that in almost every prison and jail civil action which [Allen F.] Breed was appointed by state and federal courts, he was responsible for monitoring excessive use of force. This makes all the more alarming the fact that Breed found in Texas more excessive force, in quantity and degree, than in any other state system he has seen.”16

And the entire supervisory, grievance, and investigation processes within the TDCJ serve only to condone and continue such abuses. The court found that prisoners’ properly filed grievances on specific matter

“were neither investigated nor thoroughly reviewed. The responses were often nothing more than standard stock responses [such as]. . . ‘your allegations were denied’; ‘no evidence could be found to support your claim’; ‘This office will take no further action in this matter at this time.’17

“Evidence shows that prison officials abdicated their responsibility in the area of supervision of use of force. Prison officials permit officers to submit overly general incident reports, which do not always accurately reflect the gravity of the injury to inmates. Officials turn a blind eye to serious injuries that are unexplained or suspiciously explained. It is notable that defendants never acknowledged that there was a genuine problem to address. The extent to which excessive force is used in TDCJ, combined with the inability or failure of the prison system to control use of force incidents, reflects what can only be described as an affirmative management strategy to permit the use of excessive force for both punishment and deterrence. It is clear that while [the Internal Affairs Division] goes through the motions of filing paperwork on cases, it seldom finds officer misconduct. The result is to send a clear message to line staff that excessive force will be tolerated.”18

As set out in my article on “The Texas Department of Cowboy Justice,” I’ve experienced this sadistic culture of official violence as both witness and victim. It should be noted that the proceedings in 1999 and subsequently were not undertaken to alleviate the ongoing unlawful conditions, but only to determine if systematic abuses still existed at the level that required Ruiz to remain active and the 1992 consent decree to remain in effect, even though it was proven ineffective in eliminating the culture of violent abuse and ad seg torture, which continues to this day.

Amerika Definitely Does Torture

Alongside this the courts found TDCJ’s ad-seg units to constitute “incubators of psychoses,” due to the conditions of acute mental torture inflicted in them.

“The most compelling testimony on the appalling world of ad-seg came from Dr. Haney [,who] is perhaps the nation’s leading expert in the area of penal institution psychology.”21

“Based on his inspections at Eastham, Beto and the high security unit at Estelle, Dr. Haney found ‘high numbers of prisoners were living in psychological distress and pain’ and that these inmates live under a ‘high risk of psychological harm. . . . ’”22

“According to Dr. Haney, of the perhaps dozens of prisons he has visited and studied in his career, Texas’ ad-seg units were ‘as bad or worse than any I’ve ever seen.’”23

“Dr. Haney reported one instance in which he happened to see a man removed from his cell after having cut the veins in his arms and ankles. Again, Dr. Haney was told by prison employees that such occurrences happened regularly. . . . According to Dr. Haney, ‘the level of desperation and despair in that particular facility as I saw it on the day I was there was unparalleled in my experience.’”24

“Dr. Haney also testified to the circular self-fulfilling purpose of ad-seg. Inmates in ad-seg are suffering such psychological desperation, he testified, that their behavior becomes worse and they become less able to conform to prison rules.”25

The court found Dr. Haney’s description of prisoners’ suffering in TDCJ ad-seg units “harrowing.” Here is some of what Dr. Haney described:

“The bedlam which ensued each time I walked out into one of those units, the number of people who were screaming, who were begging for help, for attention, the number of people who were smeared in feces, the intensity of the noise as people began to shout and ask, Please come over here. Please talk to me. Please help me. It was shattering. And as I discussed this atmosphere with the people who worked here, I was told that this was an everyday occurrence, and that there was nothing at all unusual about what I was seeing.”26

The court also noted Dr. Jurczak’s observations

“that administrated segregation [in TDCJ] is being used to warehouse mentally ill inmates in need for medical attention, and that the repressive conditions of administrative segregation activity actually harm such inmates.27

“. . . Dr. Jurczak testified that the ad-seg system is destructive to all its occupants. ‘I think it’s a very destructive system. And I’ve been in many, many systems. . . and I’ve never seen one as repressive as I have seen in the TDCJ.’”28

In conclusion the court found:

“The level of deprivation of basic mental health needs marked by extreme social isolation and reduced environmental stimulation were determined to violate the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. . . . Similarly, the defendants’ deliberate indifference to the risks posed by subjecting mentally ill inmates to extended periods of confinement in administrative segregation was held to be constitutionally infirm.”29

In another recent article, “Wasted Minds: An Insider’s Look at the Torturous Effects of U.S. Solitary Confinement,” I discuss the mentally damaging effects of solitary confinement on prisoners and give an account of Ellery Oliver, a TDCJ prisoner who has broken down psychologically under its conditions, and how his resultant behaviors negatively impact him and those around him.

Since being in the TDCJ I have witnessed already five beatings of prisoners: namely, on June 28, 2013, Joe Laws #553289 was brutally beaten by a group of riot armored guards and literally had his teeth kicked out as he lay on a cell floor defenseless at Estelle Unit; on August 7, 2013, at Estelle Unit, Dante Roberts #698422 was beaten at length while unconscious and with tape over his mouth by a group of riot armored guards (several of them the same guards who beat Laws), he did not regain consciousness for nearly an hour and awoke bloody and covered in bruises and cuts with both eyes swollen closed and black; on August 14, 2013, at Clements Unit, Reidie Jackson #1164177 was tackled and repeatedly punched in the face and head by prison guard Matthew Snead while handcuffed (Snead also dug his fingers into Jackson’s eyes attempting to gouge them out); on August 22, 2013, at Clements Unit, Kendall Currenton #1562220 was sprayed with excessive quantities of OC gas then beaten by a group of riot armored guards during a cell extraction as Lieutenant Antonious Flanagan used his body to block a portable audio-video camera from recording the beating, leaving Currenton with a bloody face; on September 10, 2013 at Clements Unit, after being starved for nearly a week—being denied his meals—an obviously mentally disturbed prisoner, last name Recio, was slammed to the floor by Sergeant Andrew Gratz who jumped on Recio’s head/neck with his knees.

I have also lived amid the exact sort of daily bedlam in ad-seg at Estelle and Clements Units that Dr. Haney described witnessing in the Ruiz case.

I’ve witnessed at least a dozen suicide attempts, several where the prisoners cut themselves open with razor blades—just as Dr. Haney observed. One prisoner, Allen Haynes, sliced his throat open on July 6, 2013, at Estelle Unit and was merely patched up and put right back into the same ad-seg wing. He then just two days later sliced the veins in his arms open and had to be rushed, bloody and unconscious, from the unit on a gurney, only to be patched up once again and brought right back to ad-seg.

The Same Ol’ Same Ol’

Nothing has changed in the TDCJ with respect to pervasive guard assaults on prisoners and the torturous ad-seg conditions and its use to inflict mental suffering and injury, and to warehouse the mentally disabled. The ad-seg units are literally saturated with prisoners on psychotropic medications. Thus the same inadequate method of “treating” these prisoners still exists as the Ruiz court denounced over 40 years ago, namely by administering frequent doses of controlled, behavior-altering drugs. And there is, as I have noted, the same “large number of inmates [who] resort to self-mutilations and suicide attempts, as dramatic cries for help” who only go “ignored or punished.”30

Another revealing article on the torturous conditions and effects of the TDCJs ad-seg units was written recently by TDCJ prisoner Kenneth “Haramia” Foster, titled “The Shock Doctrine in Texas Prisons.”31

Despite the ongoing savage conditions in the TDCJ, prison officials have incessantly tried to end the Ruiz case. Indeed, they appealed the 1999 decision finding ongoing systemwide constitutional violation. On that appeal, the very judge, Reynoldo Garza, who first appointed Judge Justice to the Ruiz case in the 1970’s implored Justice to finally close the case. The political climate of the 1970’s was gone, and he didn’t care about the indescribable sufferings of the prisoners. In a separate opinion in that 2001 appeal decision, Garza wrote to Justice:

“I write separately to urge Judge W. Justice to put an end to this case. I am sure that the conditions that existed when the consent decree was entered no longer exist, and I am sure many of those affected at the time are long gone from the penitentiary. If any of the present prisoners have need for some kind of help, they can file another lawsuit against the Texas Prison System, but this case has to be ended. I urge my good friend Judge W. Wayne Justice to do so if at all possible.”32)

But Justice was not moved. He’d seen too much. In spite of the limits on his power to rein in the culture of abuse in Texas prisons, Justice refused to close the case. He found “new relief must. . . be fashioned to correct the continuing violations of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.” And in answer to Garza’s appeals to friendship to end the case, Justice wrote, “So long as those conditions persist, the civil action will remain alive.”33 And while the vile conditions indeed live on, I’m told that Justice has since died.

Conclusion

So when I hear and read US officials denouncing others as torturers, terrorists, and human rights violators, while promoting the US as a so-called model democracy which the world should follow and a leader of civilized principles, I merely look around me with eyes wide open. And often I think of Frederick Douglass’s bitter rebuke of the US in 1852 when he was asked to give a July 4th commemoration speech celebrating so-called Independence Day when for his own brutally enslaved people, that holiday meant nothing but hypocrisy, where tyranny was pretentiously denounced, and the “shouts of liberty and equality [were but] hollow mockery,” where their “prayers and hymns,” “sermons and thanksgiving with all your parade and solemnity, are to [us slaves] mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy,” and all nothing but a “thin veil” to conceal practices “that would disgrace a nation of savages.”

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